Gerard Manley Hopkins Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard

Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended college in Oxford in 1863, and studied Classics.

In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to date and would not write poems again until 1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England. He was ordained in 1877 and for the next seven years carried his duties teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19690/19690-h/19690-h.htm

In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the Deutschland, was wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died. Although conventional in theme, Hopkins poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" introduced what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm." By not limiting the number of "slack" or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed for more flexibility in his lines and created new acoustic possibilities. In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in Dublin. He died five years later from typhoid fever. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918.

Never saw his work published Is considered the most innovative of

the Victorian poets Very precise and meticulous person. Very difficult to get along with. Came up with the idea of inscape-

each being in the universe enacts its identity.

The individually distinctive inner structure or nature of a thing.

Man is the most “selved” being in the universe and thus recognizes the inscape of other beings (the act of instress).

Recognizing the inscape in others leads one to God, because the inscape is a divine creation.

Poetry was a celebration of inscape by capturing the specific identity of his subjects

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder:

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "

Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that reaches from the major Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and the symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence that inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent verse written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art for Art's Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical pronouncements of the Imagists of the early twentieth

century.

Lines have a set number of stresses, but the placement is varied

Lóok at the stárs! Lóok! Look úp at the skíes!O lóok at all the fíre- fólk sítting in the áirThe bríght bóroughs, the círcle- cítadels thére!

Dówn in the dím woods the díamond délves! The élves eyes!

Hopkins usually takes the traditional metre of the English sonnet form, which is iambic pentameter (five groups, or feet, of two syllables; each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one – de dum / de dum). He then:

Introduces extra unstressed syllables to the line, extending its length, or

Sometimes he even adds an extra foot, to give the line six or even seven feet

Sometimes he marks these additions with little loops under the syllables, which he calls ‘outriders’.

This extended sound pattern is what he calls ‘sprung rhythm’. It is moving towards a freer verse form, but still using traditional poetic structures as a base.

Individuation: Conscious and the unconscious=self

actualisation

Asceticism “For Lent no pudding on Sundays. No tea,

except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in Passion week or in Fridays. Not to sit in armchair except can work no other way. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday bread and water.” (Gardner 1963:41)

Tractarian Muscular Christianity It has been argued that the birth of

Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain forged a strong “. . . link between Christianity and sport” that “. . . has never been broken” (Crepeau)

Crepeau, Richard C. 2001 Playing with God: The History of Athletes Thanking the “Big Man Upstairs”.

http://www.veritesport.co.uk/downloads/files/theology_of_sport/pdf/The_Development_of_Muscular_Christianity_in_Victorian_Britain_and_Beyond.pdf

  THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;   And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent;   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;        And though the last lights off the black West went   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—Because the

Holy Ghost over the bent  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Sibilance Personification Imagery Alliteration Neologisms Enjambement Metaphor Simile Tone

OnomatopoeiaFormEtc…

I HAD sat next, at luncheon, to an old gentleman who owned to eighty-six years, and a fine impressive machine he looked, as he told me how much he had enjoyed his long life. `If a man—or a schoolboy for that matter —', he continued, `does not get on well, it's his own fault. I well remember, when I first went to Eton, the head-boy called us together, and pointing to a little fellow with a mass of curly red hair, said, "If ever you see that boy, kick him—and if you are too far off to kick him, throw a stone." . . . He was a fellow named Swinburne,' he added. `He used to write poetry for a time, I believe, but I don't know what became of him.‘

Sitwell, Noble Essences, pp. 112-113.